Wanting: Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan's novel Wanting is set in Tasmania and uses the parallel lives of 19th century governor and polar explorer John Franklin, Charles Dickens and Mathinna, an Aboriginal girl, to explore desire and the costs of trying to use reason to control it.

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Richard Flanagan's new novel is called Wanting, in which we meet several characters who did exist in real life, as they say. Some of them did meet, but in his novel the ones that meet do so on the page in order to explore the way, as Richard Flanagan has said, 'life is finally determined never by reason, only by wanting.' A novelist, essayist, screenwriter and director, Richard Flanagan has, from the publication of his first novel Death of a River Guide, made a place for himself as a writer in the world with a breadth and depth of range of both his literary achievements and his political engagements.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping followed River Guide, and then came his internationally lauded Gould's Book of Fish. His last novel was The Unknown Terrorist, a thriller set in a dystopia which was modern-day Australia. He's co-written Baz Luhrmann's film Australia. He's won the Victorian Premier's Award this year for journalism for his long essay on the relationship between Gunns, the company behind the proposed pulp mill, and Tasmania's Labor government and the devastation of the island's forests.

And he's with me now. Richard Flanagan, welcome to The Book Show.

Richard Flanagan: Lovely to be here Ramona, and as I was saying just before I went on air, the more I write really the less and less I have to say about it beyond my writing. I think if you'd interviewed me 20 years ago I would have had so much to say when I knew nothing about it. But the more you know, the more you realise it's a mysterious thing and you're best off trusting to it and you understand less and less about it. When I say these things I'm not being dissembling, that's about as much as I know and I've learned.

Ramona Koval: Well, I tell you what, I'm going to get you to do a reading from the beginning of this book, and I reckon I'm going to be able to get you to say a few things afterwards.

Richard Flanagan: You're a devil, Ramona, but we'll battle on, yes.

Ramona Koval: I wanted to begin this morning with this reading, and this is from near the beginning of the book, and we are with George Augustus Robinson who was the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Victoria from 1839 to 1849. But before this he's been in Tasmania. What was his job there?

Richard Flanagan: He was a builder, of strong religious beliefs, and he took the job in, I think, 1829 of working as a conciliator with the Aborigines. So it was nearing the end of the Black War. And he worked for the government rounding up those Aborigines who were left under circumstances and in a way which remains the subject of much historical debate, essentially taking them captive but with vague promises of future freedoms, and had them exiled to a settlement called Wybalenna on Flinders Island.

He's a very contentious figure in both Tasmanian and Australian history, but he left an extraordinary record in his diaries, which didn't see the light of day until 1966 when the first volume of them was published under the title of Friendly Mission. That details him walking through these huge unmapped wild lands of Tasmania just with the company of a few convicts and his tame Aboriginal helpers. I think it is one of the great books of Australia because it's like a novel. He's a character who, as he passes through this land and meets these people, slowly comes to love them, and I think they are the only people with whom he fully realises what it is to be human.

Ramona Koval: You used the word 'tame' there...

Richard Flanagan: That was the term used at the time. The Aborigines were Bruny Island Aborigines. There was Truganini, Woorrady and some others. Their relationship with Robinson also remains the subject of much discussion and debate. Certainly they acted as interpreters, they acted as helpers and persuaders. I think at certain times they also acted as enforcers for him. They used physical force at the end to help bring in those last Aborigines out there. But when they came here to Victoria of course they went and told the Aborigines here to rise up and fight the white man because there was no other way. So if they'd come to some understanding with Robinson it was one they thought ultimately was wrong and hadn't worked for them.

Because in the end I think even Robinson sensed within himself that he had utterly betrayed these people who had opened up to him and who had shown him the possibility of being fully human. Every time in his diaries when he reaches this point he suddenly starts reverting to singing a hymn or writing prayers or quoting from the gospel. I think captured within him is all the conflict between good intentions, personal self-interest and the confusion and the sadness and tragedy that's characterised black and white relations in Australia ever since.

Ramona Koval: Let's have a listen to the part that you've written in Wanting.

Richard Flanagan: [reading from A small girl ran fit to burst... to ...what God was he?]

Ramona Koval: So we have Mathinna who really existed. What do we know of the historical girl?

Richard Flanagan: There's very little known about her. It's known that she was the daughter of a southwest chieftain who was brought in by force by Robinson in the early 1830s, that she was born at Wybalenna, that her father died in about 1837, his name was Towterer, and there's a remarkable portrait of him by William Buelow Gould. Robinson named him King Romeo and he named her mother Evelyn. In 1839, I think, when Sir John Franklin and Lady Jane Franklin visited, they were interested in acquiring Aboriginal skulls and also an Aboriginal child, and they were impressed by Mathinna.

We know that by the early 1840s Mathinna was living with the Franklins and that she was a sort of black princess to them, but that when Franklin was recalled in 1843 that they abandoned her and sent her to an orphanage, which even in the rather hideous world of colonial Van Diemen's Land was regarded as a hell hole. Things quickly went from bad to worse for Mathinna and she was soon living on the streets and seems to have been caught between grog and prostitution, and between a white world that despised her now and a despairing black world that she despised.

Ramona Koval: She'd been pretty and she'd been intelligent and she was a kind of experiment, wasn't she, for Lady Jane, or in the book you have her...well, is it possible to teach an Aboriginal child how to read and how to behave like a little English girl.

Richard Flanagan: Here I think we should halt for a moment because there's two things I should say here. One is that for me, this isn't a historical novel, and so much of it is imagined, and I also see it...it was really a book I wanted to write about passion and desire, and these stories which happened to come from the 19th century, or the skeleton of these stories because everything else is made up, is really just the motley I threw over these emotions that I was trying to, in a vague way, encompass myself.

Ramona Koval: Yes, I know you say it's not a historical novel and that's the explanation, but I did want to actually work out which was history and which is novel and then explore why you would do that. Because it's all very well saying it's not a historical novel except we've got Lady Jane and we've got Sir John...

Ramona Koval: But hang on, we've got these people who...and then they go back to England. Sir John Franklin goes on his expeditions to find the Northwest Passage, he dies. There's some rumour there that there's been some kind of bestial cannibalism that went on on the ship, and that's true that there was this rumour, and then Charles Dickens gets involved, which is true. And Lady Jane basically asks Charles Dickens for his support, and Charles Dickens says yes he will write a couple of articles...

Richard Flanagan: And he does.

Ramona Koval: Tell us, why does he wrote those articles?

Richard Flanagan: Again, to answer your question...at the back of the book I write how there are these bare things which are all true. it is true that there was this Aboriginal girl who was adopted by the Franklins, it is true she was abandoned, it is true that subsequently Franklin led this expedition that then vanished, that it was the great mystery of the age, that reports came back of cannibalism, and that Lady Jane, to try and salvage the reputation of her husband, enlisted Charles Dickens' aid.

And Charles Dickens wrote a very strong article saying that of course Franklin's men would never resort to cannibalism, because Dickens was a man who believed his whole life was an object lesson in disciplining desire and denying desire. He had this phrase he repeated endlessly; 'disciplining an undisciplined heart'. But what he saw in this...he became obsessed with this idea, this image of ice-bound men. I think in it he saw an idea, a symbol for his own frozen inner life. He was so obsessed by it he actually staged a play in which he starred.

Ramona Koval: And he was a very good actor in real life.

Richard Flanagan: He was a sensation. People would write at the time that he was reinventing acting, that the stage had never seen anyone like him, but it was in this particular performance as a polar explorer inspired by Franklin, who sublimates his love for a woman by essentially killing himself or allowing himself to die. This was a sensation in London. Everyone from Queen Victoria to Hans Christian Anderson wanted to see it.

Ramona Koval: I want to see it!

Richard Flanagan: Well, the script is very ordinary. I think it was all about Dickens' performance. And so you become more and more curious as to what the performance was and what animated it. He reprised the play in Manchester for some charity performances and he was playing a very large theatre, and previously he had friends of family in the manner of Victorian amateur theatricals, but now he got some professional actresses in. He used to die in the arms each night of one, an 18-year-old actress called Ellen Ternan and it was at this point that his performances became almost unearthly.

And in front of 2,000 sobbing spectators, and with Ellen Ternan, herself now sobbing uncontrollably he would each night die with her tears raining down on him. And when I read about that I realised that it was at that point that Dickens would realise that reason is a very fine thing, but wanting is the essence of life, because that moment was a metamorphosis for him, a transformation, and he emerges out of the cocoon of that role and play an entirely different man. And within a year, he's left his wife...

Ramona Koval: With ten kids.

Richard Flanagan: With nine.

Ramona Koval: Well, one died.

Richard Flanagan: One died. He's become a couple with Ellen Ternan, although it remains a hidden relationship, not only until his death but for a century after. They have a child together who dies at birth. His writing changes, and his whole relationship with Victorian society changes. I realise that these stories of an unknown Aboriginal girl at the end of the world and the most famous man of his age were in fact one, two poles of the same globe. What joined them wasn't just an odd series of connected events but something deep within the human heart with which we've always struggled and continue to struggle with, and that is this endless battle between desire and disciplining desire and reason and wanting.

I guess it all began for me when I was about 20 when I saw this painting of Mathinna as a seven-year-old child in a beautiful Regency red dress. When I was shown the painting and the person who showed me told me the story, he lifted the wooden frame off the painting, it was framed in a little oval frame, and beneath that oval frame were two bare feet. I realised that they'd used the frame to cut off that complete assertion of who she was. Like at the end of the day they'd dressed her up in the dress of reason, but there she was asserting her blackness, her Aboriginality, and they'd denied that with a wooden frame. And I thought how all their lives really are a war that never ends between wooden frames and bare feet.

Ramona Koval: The feet come and go in this book, the image of the feet, the running of the feet, the shoes on the feet, the liberation from the shoes. But also I noticed the word 'soul' appears quite a lot in this book, people's struggle for their souls. And I wonder, what does 'soul' mean to you?

Richard Flanagan: That's a very good question to which I have no good answer, but I suspect...I think our soul is that essence in which we discover all the things we share with others, not just other people but all other living things. It is our key into the cosmos. I think within it is the possibility to be liberated or oppressed, and we live caught between the constant desire to open ourselves up to that and the constant terror of what it might mean if we were to find the courage to do that.

Ramona Koval: The word 'courage'...you've said that it took you half a lifetime to have the courage to write this book. What do you mean?

Richard Flanagan: It daunted me in some many ways because I think I knew it dealt with something fundamental within us and I wanted to write it without literary ambition, I think. I wanted to write a book that just...that the writing of the story would be as much a revelation to me as it would be for those who read it. And so I felt the more and more I stripped out any glosses on what people did or thought or felt or so on, the better the book would be and the more it would reveal to me.

Ramona Koval: So it sounds like you kept paring it back and paring it back. Is that how it was?

Richard Flanagan: Very much so, yes. And also I guess from another point of view as a writer I always want to try and become a better writer because I think one of the few strengths I have as a writer is a grim awareness of my own mediocrity, so I always think I could write a sentence better. I wanted to try and learn how to write a novel that would have that compressed emotional power, and to do that I had to stick as closely as I could to story and character and constantly trust to that and trust to the reader, because the more you write, the more you learn it is not simply insulting to the reader but destructive to the book to come between the story and the reader with your own opinions or ideas.

Ramona Koval: There's a part where Sir John Franklin...there's an implication that Sir John Franklin has a sexual interest in the young Mathinna. Did I read that right?

Richard Flanagan: Yes.

Ramona Koval: I wondered to myself, did he really, the real character, the historical character?

Richard Flanagan: No, there's utterly no evidence of that. I've written up some historical notes to make clear major points of distinction between historical characters and events and what's portrayed in this book.

Ramona Koval: But then, how did you feel about making something up which was so awful for this...and pinning it on this guy?

Richard Flanagan: Firstly, Franklin has been much written about in fiction for many years with all sorts of variations of his life, from the time of his disappearance. There was a huge German bestseller written about his life called Slowness back about 20 years ago. But what I find odd is that really writers have been doing this since the Old Testament, reinventing stories about historical characters and using them to discuss the here and now.

I don't think Elizabethan audiences went to see Anthony and Cleopatra and thought people were getting a bad press from Roman times, they were interested in what it had to say about love and power now. No one reads War and Peace and sees it as an accurate portrayal of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, but these days we seem to be very uneasy about story and fancy. I don't know why we're so frightened of story when more than ever we need the liberating power of story.

It is as Oscar Wilde said, 'Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth, take the mask away and he can only lie.' I think what's wrong is when people write novels and would claim them as history because that's clearly not true, and that would be a deception. But it is odd that now people write novels and the only way they can sell them is claiming they're memoirs, you know, and so a lot of the literary scandals of recent years have been people writing very readable books but people having to pretend they're based in experience in order to have people wish to read them. Why that is is odd, but I think in a way we're a much more conformist society that the Victorians, and we're even more frightened of anything that opens ourselves up to whatever that mysterious thing we call the soul is.

Things like stories, humour, art have always been the most powerful way that we enter into everything that isn't the most obvious and crippling about ourselves, and I think there's always been a fear of novels. If you look back to the 19th century, educated people who saw themselves as cultured wouldn't wish their children to read novels, they would make them read moral grammars. And really that mentality still remains. We still as a society would rather have our people read instructive non-fiction that tells us how to live and how to behave, who we should sleep with and what we should do. We don't want to read books, stories, that reflect back to us only the chaos and uncertainty of this life and which, if they have any redeeming feature, it is simply to remind us that in our own strange uncertainties, we're never alone.

Ramona Koval: Let's talk about Dickens as a writer. There's a part there where you've said his soul was corroding; 'it was as if the more of him there was in his books, the less of him in life', 'only in his work did Dickens feel that he became himself', 'his novels were true in a way life was not'. I wondered whether you could talk a little bit about that. Is that something that you feel when you're writing a novel, that you pour yourself into it like that?

Richard Flanagan: I've always wanted to write a novel that was at least in part about a writer and about writing and about the cost and difficulty of it and the pain of it because I think a lot of writers have that sense that they're slowly corroded by what they make and that they can end up becoming less, that somehow some essence of them leaches out as they slowly make these things, and in the end all they have to offer after death is a sort of carapace that's emptied out of everything. I'm not saying I feel that way...

Ramona Koval: You sound a bit sympathetic.

Richard Flanagan: But if you read something like, say, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up which is the most extraordinary piece of writing about a man who feels he's cannibalised himself in order to make things for others...I think it does happen, I think it's real. And so I don't know whether Dickens felt that or not but I like the idea of being able to convey to readers that...one of the myths that I'm guess I'm sitting here in the studio perpetuating is that a writer starts off with certain ideas and plans with a novel and then he achieves them in the writing of it, and that's not the case, it's far more complex, strange and mysterious, and also more spiritually damaging sometimes. It isn't necessarily something that brings a great deal of benefit ultimately to the people who do it.

Ramona Koval: Spiritually damaging?

Richard Flanagan: I think it is. If you look at the history of writers, a lot of them feel like they've lost something fundamental in themselves in the process of writing. Not all writers, but some. And certainly a lot of the very great writers seem to have that sense about themselves.

Ramona Koval: If you had been one of those writers who felt that they'd lost something by writing this book, what would it have been?

Richard Flanagan: I'm not one of those writers, Ramona, so the question doesn't apply, I'm just a weary old hack making do as best I can. But I am ever more intrigued by what the process of creation does to those who create, and I guess I enjoyed writing about that and thinking about it a little more.

Ramona Koval: The part where Dickens is performing and he's wanting very much to be this character that he's allowed to be...he's allowed to be this character on the stage that has moved from being rather spotty maybe to a great human being, and he loves that transformation and he takes it on. Does a writer like you sometimes feel you take on the characters that you're writing about? You must. You must feel like George Augustus Robinson as he's desperately trying to recognise what's in front of his face by using reason and by using the new methods of science and not seeing that the people are dying around him for reasons that might be a bit obvious. But it just seemed to me you so inhabited those characters.

Richard Flanagan: Well, I'd like to say both because it would reflect better on me and because it is the thing that people now say, that they inhabit characters and we all have this marvellous empathy with our creations, but I didn't feel that way. I felt the more I stood outside of the characters, the better I might write about them. I simply tried to see them and describe them.

Ramona Koval: So is that using reason more than emotion?

Richard Flanagan: No. Again, it's sort of sensing that what you're doing is telling a story and trying to see the story and simply report it and tell it as accurately and hopefully as compellingly as you can. So I think it can lead to a lot of bad writing where you think you can be somebody because perhaps you can't ever be anybody else, but you can see other things and report back on them. That's not entirely true. There's nothing you can say about writing that isn't entirely true.

It is true, as Flaubert said, 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' I mean, there is a sense in which every character and everything in the book is the writer. There is another sense at which at a certain point you have to be removed from it. There is a point at which writing is very mysterious and you advance into your soul to discover the possibility of being all other people and all other things. It's equally true there's a very conscious and cunning crafting of all that. So I always leave interviews feeling a shocking liar, which perhaps is appropriate for a writer.

Ramona Koval: What was the point at which, years and years after you first saw that painting, that you thought 'now is the time to revisit Mathinna and see what I make of her'?

Richard Flanagan: I don't know, it was a slow thing, it was several things. One was I kayaked the Fitzroy River in flood with some old river guides, and it was Bunuba country and we took some Bunuba blokes down with us who were extraordinary because they were still living in this traditional world, they were fully initiated men, they still lived in the Dreaming. And one night one of them was talking about...because up there they're still bare feet, and if they play their footy they don't wear their footy boots, they wear their footy boots to the dances...

Ramona Koval: I've seen that.

Richard Flanagan: But they were saying how everything rises up through your feet, and not just the earth but life itself. And that took me back to that picture of Mathinna. And the second thing was I began thinking about Leda and the swan, the myth of Leda and the swan, and how there was an utterly different mythology here and that odd clash, not just of the European world and the Indigenous world but of two types of mythologies. And the third thing was just reading the article Dickens wrote, this man of immense empathy writing this absurd article believing that the Eskimos would have been the cannibals who ate the Franklin expedition.

Ramona Koval: The book is called Wanting, it's published by Knopf. And, Richard Flanagan, I think we found a few things to say. Thanks so much for joining us this morning on The Book Show.